Agency Insight: USAID Bangkok

Nate Nash / Jan 10, 2013

So...as you all know, we recently released our first product, hōrd. During said launch, we tweeted the only USAID Mission who was following us on Twitter about the capabilities of hōrd. They were kind enough to engage so we thought we would use some of the data we harvested to provide a little insight into their world. So here you go, USAID Timor-Leste...thanks for the tweet.

The image above can be simply described as 10 years worth of development work from the Thailand USAID-Bangkok Mission. We chose this mission because according to our data, work that is performed in Timor-Leste typically comes out of the Thailand office. How did we do this you ask? Well...first we mined every posted, fair and open competition solicitation for the last 10 years. Then, we did a little something called entity-extraction, focusing on topics that were relevant to the biz of international development. Finally, we cleaned them up, consolidated where necessary, and voila! At a glance you can see the relevant technical areas of this specific mission over the last 10 years.

The image above is the number of solicitations released by the same mission (Thailand) over the past 10 years. This is merely the number of solicitations not the value of the contracts awarded. Seemingly, one could draw the conclusion that this particular geography is an increasing priority for foreign assistance spending. However, without cross referencing actual dollars spent, one may be off the mark. Either way, we like the chart and thought you might too.

While building hōrd, we had to crunch a pretty sizable chunk of data. Naturally, there are interesting trends and insights that come from such an activity. We'll keep posting stuff we find interesting as well as use this data to improve hōrd. And finally, thanks again to USAID Timor-Leste for engaging in the conversation.